Wired for gaming: Brain differences in compulsive video game players

Most readers get access through a library or their place of work (usually those involved with scientific industries). I don't know if I've ever heard from anyone paying those prices for a single article. If you went to a 4 year college at some point you might want to check if your login to the library still works. You can search for the article there to read it.

I've personally done competitive gaming (in several FPS games I was on teams that were top-5 worldwide, although these were older games, before 'competitive gaming' was considered a 'real' thing), competitive chess, and played various sports competitively.

The one thing they all require: lots of practice. It's not enough to be a "good" chess player - you need to know the openings, know the responses, and you train repetitively for many scenarios. Simply analysing the possibilities and being smart isn't enough at higher levels, even if it's enough to blow away most good casual players...

Same goes for games - for FPS games you memorize maps, coordinate with your team-mates, and practice, practice, practice. For RTS games, it's much like chess - you practice openings, plan for various scenarios, memorize sequences of moves, and so on. If you're on a team, you can practice combining different strategies (often I'd play an early rush, while my team-mate would develop to a later-game state as quickly as possible). Winning tournaments is nothing like winning non-competitive games - it's more of a grind where every detail matters.

I'm sure it all requires a good amount of mental aptitude, however training is still key, and the amount of time spent practising somewhat precludes the possibility of being equally skilled in other tasks (while you can be above average in many things, good luck being at the 'top' of more than 1 of these activities).

Edit - I didn't really comment on the main article. Personally I don't think being good at a video game is in any way related to compulsive gaming. A similar comparison is between problem gamblers and professional poker players - they do the same activity, but their motivations are much different.

Anecdata; I played comp TF2 for ~3 years a while back, won some negligable amounts in tournaments a few times.

Most of the people I played with were "Really Normal"(tm). While it certainly skewed aggressively the younger male demographic, most of the people were either students or typically blue collar, with a few programmers/other types of tech as you'd expect. I never noticed any sort of real similarity in the personalities of even the top players either; it seemed as much a "collection of normal gamers" as you could get from most other reasonably heterogeneous pc game strata.

The difference is that compulsive gamers have little control over their play time. If you play games for long periods of time, it does not mean you are compulsive, if you do it by choice, because let's say, you have nothing better to do. You are compulsive if you just can not simply stop playing game. It boils down to the difference in brain connectivity, because it is impossible to differentiate the two only looking at behavior over some period of time.

Hopefully they don't draw polarize the two personas by bringing up paid DOTA2 gamers playing 15 hours/day vs the soccer mom who loves her 15 minute daily dose of Angry Birds